Category Archives: War Crimes

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180 Boys in Two Dorms, 11-Year-Old Found Dead in Hyderabad Juvenile Home — At a government-run juvenile home in Hyderabad, the mysterious death of an 11-year-old boy this week has uncovered horrifying conditions in which nearly 200 boys are forced to live. The boy was found dead in his bed on Wednesday morning in the home located in the city’s Saidabad area. The police suspect that he was allegedly sexually assaulted and murdered by a fellow inmate.

Ex-Boy Scout describes mental scars left by abuse at trial — A California man suing the Boy Scouts of America over sexual abuse suffered at the hands of a volunteer Scout leader was so scarred by the incident that he once threw up outside a restaurant when he saw someone who looked like the man, he testified in the opening day of a civil trial. The 20-year-old man, who was 13 when he was molested in 2007, told jurors Monday that he secretly taped the Scout leader making a partial confession because it was “a 13-year-old’s word against a Scout leader, an adult.” Continue reading →

Of all the things revealed in the recent report of the CIA’s torture practices, I hardly expected to find this:

According to the committee report “at least five CIA detainees were subjected to “rectal rehydration” or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity”. The report identifies a chief of Interrogations referring to medically unnecessary rectal feeding and hydration as illustrative of the interrogator’s “total control over the detainee”.

Alongside the psychological effects of this torture, physical injuries were sustained by at least one detainee as a result of rectal feeding. The detainee was “diagnosed with chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic rectal prolapse”.

I am sure the first two symptoms are self-explanatory, however, the latter may require explanation. Rectal prolapse occurs when the rectum walls protrude from the anus.

Even if the detainee refused food, this sort of procedure is clearly a violation of the Geneva Convention and obviously torture. It is also unquestionably rape. Continue reading →

Breaking the stigma surrounding male rape — South Africa’s rape statistics are among the highest in the world. Most interventions to reduce these figures focus on female survivors. Matrix Men, an organisation that supports male rape survivors, says the stigma surrounding this crime makes it difficult to obtain reliable statistics. Activists believe as many as one in six men will in their lifetime suffer sexual abuse – and say men should start talking about it.

Ex-Big Brothers volunteer seeks to overturn sex abuse conviction — The judge who heard the child sexual abuse case against a McHenry County Big Brothers volunteer should not have allowed testimony alleging the man committed inappropriate acts decades ago, his attorney argued Thursday in appellate court. Attorney Doug Johnson asked a 2nd District appeals panel in Elgin to throw out the conviction of Leonard Puccini, 54, a Bull Valley man who was found guilty last year of sexually abusing a 12-year-old boy in 2009 whom he was mentoring through the Big Brothers.

The Islamist terror group Boko Haram kidnapped at least 97 men and boys and killed 28 people this week in a raid on villages in Borno State in northeast Nigeria, a local leader and residents said Friday.

Boko Haram gunmen also injured 25 others during the raid in which scores of homes were burned, the sources said.

The gunmen raided the farming and fishing village of Doron Baga and surrounding villages on the shores of Lake Chad, about 110 miles north of the state capital, Maiduguri.

The raid and kidnappings occurred on Monday, but the news did not emerge sooner due to lack of communication and because cell phone towers were destroyed in previous Boko Haram attacks.

It is worth noting that even though the majority of the victims of this series of kidnappings and murders were male, various media outlets chose to ignore their sex. For example, the CNN article quote above is titled “Boko Haram kidnaps at least 97, kills 28 in raid.” Continue reading →

The Guardian published an article titled Male rape: the last human rights taboo. Rich McEachran questions why NGOs pay so little attention to sexual violence against men and boys despite growing concern for the problem:

There is a disconcerting disparity between how various aid organisations and NGOs are dealing, or are failing to deal, with the issue. On a macro-level, organisations may not be aware of what they’re looking for and may not see how male rape fits into the bigger picture. It may come as a surprise that the UN only changed its own definition of rape to cover male victims, in 2011; this followed the publication of an article in The Observer.

NGOs at a micro-level, some of whom are already working with male survivors – the Refugee Law Project for instance – face major obstacles, such as acquiring funding and carrying out field work or accessing survivors in remote areas. The author of the aforementioned article spoke to Chris Dolan, the director of RLP, who claimed that one of the project’s donors refused to provide future funding if 70% of the client base wasn’t female.

Despite the fear of losing funding, the pervasiveness of the problem (academic Lara Stemple writes that male sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war from Chile to Iran, Kuwait to Uganda) means that the humanitarian community needs to challenge perceptions of rape, improve understanding and create awareness.

Yet that may be difficult to do given the gendered focus on sexual violence. As McEachran notes in the article, many NGOs use gendered language to refer to victims of sexual violence. Even in instances in which NGOs acknowledge the existence of abused men and boys, little of their literature mentions those experiences. Continue reading →

I knew this would eventually happen. I knew some fundamentalist terrorist group would eventually kidnap boys. They cannot help themselves. They are compelled by their fanaticism to do stupid, horrible things. So it was only a matter of time before some well-known group went after boys. This time it was ISIS. According to the Guardian:

The kidnapping of 186 teenage boys in Syria on 30 May has gone largely unreported in the wider world, a curious omission given the outcry over the teenage girls in Nigeria. The abduction was no less sinister. The students needed to travel from the Kobani enclave on the Turkish border to Aleppo to take their exams, as required by Syria’s education system. The journey is perilous, but they reached Aleppo without incident. On the way home, however, a convoy of about 10 minibuses containing 186 boys aged 14-16 was stopped and taken to a religious school in Minbej, for training in the Qur’an and jihad. The vast majority are still there.

The omission is not curious. One hundred and eighty-six boys simply does not bring out international concern. After all, they are boys. Who, other than their parents, cares if some militant terrorist group kidnaps them? Continue reading →